Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

The rabbi’s eyes narrowed on hers as Saw Lay went on. “But the bigger problem — the insurmountable problem — is that you are not a Jew, Khin. And he says that you can’t simply become a Jew. Apparently, you must be born Jewish, which means being born to a Jewish mother. And so you see, Benny’s child will not be Jewish, not unless you and the child convert — something that he is required by his holy book to try to dissuade you from doing. Not that you would ever consider conversion.”

Of course she knew what the word “conversion” meant; it immediately conjured the image of members of her village surrendering to their icy river in baptism, and reminded her chillingly of the falseness of her own faith. That falseness wasn’t as simple as her having begun to doubt the existence of a higher power after the dacoits incident; such would have been a cheap form of doubt, because faith, she had come to feel, derived its meaning from difficulty. Rather it seemed to her that baptism was a desperation to submerge doubt in the rescuing waters of belief, a desperation to wash away aeons of suffering with the promise of salvation. To her mother’s and sister’s satisfied dismay, she had many times refused the village minister’s attempts to lure her down to the riverbank to be reborn — but now, in the face of this rabbi, who peered with such grave concern at her (and at the problem of Benny’s having gone astray), she longed all at once to be saved.

“Is it so hard to convert to Judaism?” she asked him.

As the rabbi turned expectantly to Saw Lay, no doubt awaiting his interpretation, the latter gazed at her in reproachful panic. “It isn’t a matter of walking into a river and accepting the faith of Jewish elders,” he whispered to her, as though all along he’d been reading her mind. “I can’t believe you know what it means to be a Jew.”

“It means not believing that Christ is the Messiah,” she found herself replying. The words had come from a deep, as yet untapped well within her, and she suddenly had to swallow to prevent herself from sobbing. Strictly, it wasn’t that she doubted Christ was the Messiah, but that she didn’t believe in anyone’s capacity to know that he had been — that, ultimately, she didn’t believe in sure-footed belief. Faith without belief — that’s what she wanted, something that seemed suddenly, irrationally possible in this realm of her husband’s ancestors.

Idiocy! Saw Lay’s eyes seemed to reflect back to her, before he turned his gaze away and stared out the small window facing the barren cemetery. “To be a part of this — this—” he said, gesturing to the expanse of the surprised rabbi’s office and beyond, “you would have to shed your very skin, shed your past and every last thing you were taught to believe in — all your customs, the teachings of our elders, the realms of the spirits, the Christian parables!”

For a moment, no one said anything. Then the rabbi’s head fell into his hands. He seemed to be praying, or summoning some higher wisdom. When at last he raised his eyes to them and began speaking, it was with newfound grief and calm. And as if steadied by his words, or as if steadying himself to translate them, Saw Lay breathed deeply. “In the Jewish faith,” he said to her finally, “one needn’t become a Jew to find one’s place in the coming world.”

It wasn’t that this rabbi had spoken to her as a Burman might; anytime a Burman engaged with a Karen, it was with the posture of superiority — intellectual, spiritual, racial. No, this rabbi hadn’t condescended to her, but he had treated her as something alien. He was fighting to preserve his people in a country, it so happened, that was ceaselessly obliterating hers. And she saw that much as she wanted to find someplace to take root with Benny, she would never not be a lost Karen. She would never not be wandering in the desert, homeless, unwanted — except by some of her own. Except by equally rootless Benny.

Abruptly she burned for her husband, and she pushed back her chair and stood. “Please thank the rabbi for his time,” she told Saw Lay. “Thank you,” she said to the rabbi in English.

Neither man immediately responded. Then the rabbi smiled at her, the light of defeat shining in his eyes. He slid the letter across the desk, saying something to her that, despite the roughness of his voice, struck her ears as almost loving. “One of man’s injunctions is to strive to live joyously,” Saw Lay translated. “In the face of these terrible wars abroad, when our very peace is threatened, we must find a way to rejoice in our circumstances. We must find a way to do more than endure.”

She summoned the courage to tell Benny about the clandestine meeting a few weeks later, in September 1940. Rather than being enraged, Benny was touched and took her in his arms, ignoring the letter from his aunt that she held out to him. They must invite Saw Lay to the flat to discuss the matter openly, he told her in his increasingly fluent Burmese. And they must wait to open the letter until Saw Lay could join them.

She would never forget the night when they did open the letter, just days before their child was born. They had sated themselves on a variety of dense Burmese dishes, which she had been preparing recently to fatten Benny up — pork and coconut milk noodle soup, deep-fried squash, and curried meat stewed in sesame oil — followed by cake and cigarettes and generous tumblers of Scotch for the men; and when they moved into the living room, Benny belched and, in an English she could just understand, said, “Looks like it’s about that time, don’t it?”

He sat heavily on their cane sofa, taking his spectacles from the coffee table while she brought him the letter and the small opener he preferred. She and Saw Lay sat across from him, and she noticed how much older Benny had become, the new spectacles poised on the tip of his nose as he worried the envelope open with the knife. Only in his twenties, and already his hair lightly graying, his upper body — in spite of her efforts to put weight on him — losing a measure of its massiveness. He set the opener on the coffee table and extracted a single sheet of folded paper from the envelope. “Let’s see. Let’s see,” he said, as he unfolded the thing and leaned back into the sofa. He began to read, his eyes squinting with the faintest frown.

“Well then?” Saw Lay said.

“Benny?” she said, frightened for him.

He looked up at her then, letting the letter fall with his hand before he removed his spectacles. “Do me favor, darling?” he said to her in Burmese. “Burn it in stove for me.”

He held the letter up, shaking it slightly, gesturing for her to take it, to be rid of it. And when she did, sadly, he caught her by the hand and smiled into her eyes and said something that Saw Lay later rendered for her in Karen: “One mustn’t make the mistake of judging one’s relationship to a person by how that relationship ends. No, one must look at the entire canvas. When I think of the woman who wrote this letter, my auntie Louisa, I think mostly of my childhood. I think of the kindnesses she showed me after Mama and Daddy died. She was a warrior in her way, Auntie Louisa — did you know that’s what her name means? ‘Renowned warrior.’ And was she ever a fighter! I think if it had been acceptable, she would have pummeled me for every schoolyard fight. If we have a girl, we shall name her after her. Louisa. Renowned warrior.”

And what a warrior little Louisa turned out to be. Khin gave birth to her — with the aid of a midwife at home — in total silence, and Louisa’s immediate and unrelieved cries seemed like an argument against Khin’s practice of stoic submission to pain. She had Benny’s thick hair and Benny’s angry fists and Benny’s unremitting need for Khin’s body, for Khin’s breasts. Yet how furious Louisa was when digestion caused her discomfort! How piercingly she screamed! And how thorough were Khin’s tears for her baby, whose slightest suffering seemed to her as weighty as all the agony the world had ever seen. Louisa screamed when she woke and Khin was not immediately in sight. She shook if Khin was more than a minute rushing to her side. She stuck out her bottom lip — even at two weeks! — when anyone but her mother or father approached, as though she were keenly aware of her unjust vulnerability and mustering any line of defense in her personal command.